Cornering a predator
by CJ304
Summary: ...is very bad for your health. Weiss is not a predator, but as a Hunter, she might as well be one as far as the world of Remnant is concerned. And Jacques is about to receive a very thorough reminder that there are consequences to backing a predator into a corner, and then attacking them. AKA: The Reaction That We All Wanted To That Scene With Jacques.


**Disclaimer: I don't own RWBY, or any characters therein. I also don't condone violence, though I do condone self-defense.**

 **The scene that Weiss deserved. That is all I will say.  
**

* * *

The _smack_ echoed throughout the mansion, the echo seeming to fill the suddenly quiet room.

Jacques sneered at his rebellious daughter, apparently the soft touch had been too gentle, so now he'd have to apply a little more force.

No more leniency.

"-ike, me…?"

What?

Had his rebellious _brat_ of a daughter spoken back to him? She was beginning to be as bad as his sister.

"What did you say, _girl?_ "

Weiss slowly turned her head to look him in the eye.

There was something wrong, Jacques realized. There was something wrong with her eyes. Was it a trick of the light? What was it? Why did they look so different, suddenly?

Weiss spoke again, her words quiet, cold, and precise.

"I said: did you just _strike me?_ "

There was contempt in her voice.

Contempt and disgust and nothing else.

There was no respect, no deference, nothing positive.

No love, no respect, no sign of familial connection. Nothing to show any kind of sign that she considered his opinion important anymore.

And he would have raged at that, but somewhere in the back of his mind he noticed a lack of something else: fear, hesitation. Some part of him, the part that used and moved people as tools in his rise to power whispered at him that he was on the edge of losing control.

"And I'll do it again for your cheek!"

So his hand lashed out again, desperate to regain his power over his daughter.

Jacques had married into the Schnee family. It had been a marriage of politics and power, to grant him access to a famous name and an inherited business he could exploit. He was not a Schnee by blood, he had none of their pedigree, their generations of Aura use, their history as warriors.

Jacques had not had his Aura awakened, he had no Semblance, and he had honestly never held a weapon properly for a single day in his life.

Her hand flashed out, catching his without any difficulty.

He looked into his daughter's eyes, and felt cold.

"Did you know that's illegal?" she asked suddenly.

Jacques tried to free his hand from her grasp, and felt her _squeeze_ lightly. He watched her very intently, suddenly feeling his world spin.

"What?" he managed to force through suddenly dry lips, feeling his equally dry tongue scrape the inside of his mouth.

"Did you know that _hitting your children_ is _illegal_?" she _squeezed_ again, and Jacques tried to force his breathing to remain even. He _would not_ show hesitation to his daughter! He'd bring her to heel after this, and punish her most severely, but first he'd clear away these ridiculous thoughts.

"I learned that at _Beacon_ , you know? Apparently they call that _abuse,_ _ **Father**_." She fluttered her lashes at him, as though sharing a joke she'd heard from her asinine schoolmates "Apparently, you are not supposed to _beat your children_ when raising them…" she shrugged, and _never let go of his wrist_ while she did it.

"I had a rather… _interesting_ … talk about it with my friends when the subject came up…" she looked at him through her lashes "I wonder… did you ever _dread_ me finding out about that?"

"Don't be _stupid_ , girl." He grit out through clenched teeth "Everyone handles discipline differently. No court would _ever_ take this seriously." Not with what he paid his Legal Team, and all the money he funneled to the Council to gain political favor.

"Is that so…?" She raised a delicate eyebrow, and _finally_ released his wrist. He stumbled back, clutching it, as she _turned her back on him_ and started strolling towards the wall.

He took a shaky breath, but managed to sound firm and angry when he answered. Control, _control_. Remind her who is in control.

"Nobody wants to get involved in _family matters_ when dealing with giants like us, Weiss. _Nobody._ "

She hummed. Her back was still to him. She was looking at a Coat-Of-Arms, fittingly enough. Good, it would remind her _why_ nobody would stick their necks out for her is she went through with this.

Now, all he needed to do was take a brisk run while she was turned away. As he thought this, he reached for a nearby vase.

"So no one is going to protect you, then?"

The words stopped him cold.

What?

What?!

Wh-

A giant fist, made of ice and gleaming in the lights of the manor appeared right next to him, and struck him clearly across the face.

 _ **WHAM!**_

Jacques _screamed_ , as he flew through the air. He turned around, spun by the force of the blow, and tripped over his own two feet as he tipped over and hit the floor.

"Wha-?"

He mumbled through a mouth full of blood. His lip had split, he'd bitten his tongue, and he felt his cheek aching. It felt like he'd been driven into a wall.

"Weiss, wha-"

His eyes refused to focus. Blearily, he tried to make sense of the white blur approaching him.

"You, you can't, you damn girl you _can't-"_

 _ **THUNK**_

The antique, but still very functional, sabre made a weighty sound as Weiss drove it into the floor, just next to his head.

He could _feel_ his hair part.

His crazy bitch of a daughter had just cut his hair!

"Weiss" he tried to be firm, had to regain control "you can't-"

 _ **SMACK**_

His head was reeling again. Hs teeth shook with the blow, as she hit him _right in the mouth._

"Mmmmm" he moaned in pain.

"Oh, don't worry _Father_. It's only a little _discipline_." She _cooed_ at him. There was a smile on her face now, but it was a cold one. An icy one.

It made him afraid.

"You" he croaked out "I'll have you _ruined_ for this-"

 _ **SMACK**_

He saw stars. He saw stars and let out a whimper at the pain, at the _humiliation,_ at the realization that he'd lost _any_ form of control he'd once had.

" _Ruin me?_ For defending myself against someone who struck a _Hunter_ across the face?"

Hunter. The word rolled through his mind. Reminding him that Weiss, his usually meek, obedient daughter, was a trained fighter and in fact an actual human counter to the _literal monsters_ that preyed on humanity. Someone that was trained to respond to violence with greater violence.

And he had pushed her over the edge by striking her.

He rolled over, a desperation filling him as he scrambled for the doors.

He'd barely made it thirty feet, hearing the suddenly _impossibly loud_ echoing of his daughter's steps as she slowly, patiently followed him, when a Glyph appeared on the floor, freezing it and coating it with a layer of ice.

He tripped, tumbling down the corridor, when another Glyph appeared under him, and suddenly he was _shooting_ down the hallway, flying past doors as he got closer to the _stairs, STAIRS-_

He fell down the stairs, tumbling down them with each _bump_ and _crash_ of his body hitting the hard floor registering as another star filling his vision.

As he finally reached the bottom, he laid there for several moments, before he finally managed to start thinking again.

"Help" he croaked out "help me, my daughter's gone _mad"_

He heard gentle _clacks_ as she approached.

Tears filled his eyes. To his complete horror, he was _crying_.

"Help" he croaked out again.

"There's no one coming, you realize?" She sounded so _amused_ when she said it.

"You treat everyone else in this place exactly the same as you treat me: terribly" her face suddenly grew cold again "And no matter how many chances they gave you, no matter how many _excuses_ they _make-_ "

She suddenly couched down, her face close to his as her hands grabbed his face. "And I made _so many excuses for you!"_

She shook him then, her fingers tightening against him as she ranted. "I made so many _excuses_ for you: you were tired, you were stressed, the White Fang again!"

He tried to say something, tried to gargle a response, but she saw him opening his mouth and slapped her hand against his mouth, and kept it there.

"I made excuses for you in public, to my friends, to _Mom and Winter and Whitley_." She was gritting her teeth again, a fierce expression on her face.

"I told myself; _he doesn't mean it,_ and _then_ I said, _it was a mistake_ , and then I said, _it would never happen again._ " She jerked his neck as she said it, shaking him again and again.

"And _then_ " she sneered, building up more and more "I said to myself; _it's for the family, it's for our image, it's for our legacy_ "

She finally let go, standing up and flicking his blood off her hands. "We wouldn't want to _dishonor_ the family name, after all" she spat out.

Jacques trembled, his breath coming out in wheezes. This couldn't be happening. This wasn't _supposed_ to be happening. His was meant to control the family, to run it and discipline and cut loose the unruly elements. Not this, not _this_

Weiss towered over him, and in her shadow he could see it, the ancient guardian of the family, manifesting behind her. It was cold, regal, and loomed behind her, an icy sentinel, a knight made of frozen willpower that represented what the Schnee truly stood for.

"The only one bringing dishonor to the family name is _you._ " She declared. It rang out like a judgement from on high. He could feel his world crumbling around him.

"You won't get away with this." He wheezed past swollen, bleeding lips "I'll have your _head_ for this! I'll report you to-"

"Father" she cut him off. She never raised her voice, but Jacques suddenly found himself shutting up, his throat constricting. He panicked further, feeling the tables turn, their positions reverse. "Don't you remember?" she cooed faux-sympathetically.

"No one wants to get involved in _family matters_ when it comes to people like us." She threw his words back at him, and did so with a dark glee.

"And besides" her mouth twisted in a sharp grinning-sneer "What _will_ Ironwood say when I, the _sister_ of his close assistant, _whom he knows you disowned_ , tells him that you struck _a Hunter of Remnant_ across the face?"

She looked down on him, and Jacques could feel his last desperate attempts to regain any sense of power dying like embers in the winter night.

"Why, if I tell him: ' _Every family handles discipline differently'_ " her voice imitated his, mocking and derisive, and Jacques felt what was left of his will start to break "I bet he'll say ' _You have a point, wouldn't want to overstep into your_ _ **family matters**_."

Jacques swallowed, feeling his body drain of the last of the fight he'd been nursing.

He'd lost this round, lost almost everything.

He needed to plan, needed to think of what he could do to fix this later when Weiss wasn't on the warpath-

 _ **THUNK**_

Jacques _shrieked_ at the sound the blade of ice made, when his suddenly cold-again daughter drove it at an angle, nearly hitting his face.

He could feel pieces of his moustache falling against his lips, and he spit and spat at the intrusion.

" _Now_ " the vengeful manifestation of the Family that he'd been abusing for years purred out above him "let's _talk_ about the Family name, and our businesses and practices, and, oh yes, _Winter_ and her legal right to take over the family name."

Her eyes were predatory. She seemed at once, part hunting cat, part fierce dragon, part executioner.

Where had she _learned_ to defy him like this?

Broken, Jacques weakly tried to inch back, accepting that after this, he was _done_.

Above him, Weiss continued to smile. She might be leaving this cage soon, but she'd do it on _her terms_. Not _his._

 _Never his, ever again!_

* * *

So, this is a short story written in roughly an hour.

Honestly, most of this was written in a rage driven frenzy after readying Solora Goldsun's AMAZING story **Leo et Cygnus** _(which you should read, their work is all gold) and  
_ remembering how much I hate Jacques as a person. He's deliberately designed to be a hate sink in the fandom, so I went 'fuck it' and wrote this.

Ahem. That said: abuse is never an easy thing to deal with. Even if you learn how to fight after being abused, how to be stronger than your abuser, conditioned responses often make it _so hard_ to stand up to them. Not to mention the difficulty in raising your hand to your family members, who use that familial love against you. This is likely why canon Weiss, when though she is a Grimm killing Hunter who can summon ice golems, wield a sword, and conjure magical Glyphs, never thinks of fighting back against him in a direct way.

That didn't happen here, of course. :p

Push someone too many times, too far. Push them again and again and again.

Trap them and corner them.

And, well, the nature of a cornered person pushed to their limit is to either remove themselves from the situation entirely, through any means necessary, OR to fight back and utterly destroy the thing hurting them, even if they'd previously hesitated to attack.

Weiss chose differently, here.

And as a result, she's going to leave her family home with her head held high, her mother in rehab, her older sister putting her brother though fencing lessons, and her 'father' slowly signing away his control of the company as he sleeps in a guest bedroom in the manor guest house. (The servants are rather gleeful at the chance to watch him and report on his actions)

And then she gets involved in canon Volume 5, survives a spear through the gut, and the adventure continues.

 **Abuse is a terrible thing to go through. It's horrible and scary and painful, be it emotional, physical, verbal or any other form. If you're being abused, please, talk to someone. You can take a stand. It doesn't have to be violent. It doesn't have to be against them directly. All you need to do is find the courage to talk to someone. One step.**

 **"Keep Moving Forward..." - Monty Oum**


End file.
